On Hegel and History, as applied to Marxist Political Economy, My identity, and My Love

First, a compendium of concepts. Next, its application to my life.

From my First-Year Seminar:

Hegel's view on history can be summed up in three main points:

1) History is not a random sequence of events but a comprehensible process governed by objective laws that can only be grasped by looking at history as a whole.

2) History is not a unified, linear progress in a single direction, but a sort of dialectical process. It consists of stages of development, each of which is comprised of contradictions that resolve in higher synthesis in the next stage:

THESIS, ANTITHESIS, SYNTHESIS

3) History is the story of the development of ideas. The dialectical development of human thought is the motor of history. This progress of the human mind continues towards a goal: self-consciousness. At the end of history, humans realize they are the architect of reality. Through self-consciousness, the human spirit becomes aware of its freedom, and man is master of himself. ["There is no spoon." - The Matrix]

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This third point is called Idealism: the belief that ideas are primary and physical reality is secondary; that mind governs reality. Marx, a Materialist, differed from Hegel in this respect only. He believed that material and physical reality precedes human ideas.

Applied to political economy, this embodies the difference between Marx and Weber's views on capitalism. While Weber believed that the ideology of the Protestant ethic helped to give birth to Capitalism, Marx believed that the material realities of the world give birth to human ideology.

Specifically, Marx believed that within the infrastructure of society, the mode of production, or technology, is the keystone. Society is shaped around the material technology of production available to workers. The social relations of production, which is composed of one, property relations (who owns what) and two, division of labor (who performs what task) are dependent on the mode of production. Thus, the following quotation from Marx:

"The plow gives you the master and the slave. The windmill gives you the lord and the serf. The steam engine gives you the capitalist and the worker."

On top of this infrastructure of technology and social relations is built a superstructure of culture, values, and a political and legal system. With this superstructure comes the ideology of society, how society interprets itself. This ideology comes from the ruling class and is transmitted to society as a whole. Thus the ideology often conforms around the reality, bringing justification to injustice, and value to the invaluable. Every age there is a different superstructure. The task of the social scientist is to find out how things really work.

Thus, according to Marx, change of ideology roots not from pure human reason and innovation, but from a change in the material composition of society, most specifically from a change in technology. Constant technical progress makes for constant change in social relations of production, which in turn creates change of ideology. This process is entitled Historical Materialism and exists in stark contrast to Hegel's Historical Idealism.

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Although Marx' Historical Materialism seems more evident than Hegel's Historical Idealism, I am drawn on a spiritual level to the Hegelian belief of mind over reality. We are the architects of our own lives - Hegel asserts. Through self-consciousness, we are free to shape truth in the light of beauty. Such, I believe, is the nature and necessity of art.

I am constantly in the process of interpreting and re-interpreting my life: my feelings, my desires, my history, my relationships, my values, and my goals. My personal history is not unlike Hegelian dialectical history; it is full of contradictions, theses and antitheses, that synthesize at every stage of my life to give me a compounded, multi-dimensional, and variable identity. My personal ideologies are often tailored to changes in the infrastructure of my life: my material surroundings, my social relationships, and my production patterns. But just as often, my ideologies of the moment, which change from day-to-day according to what I learn, read, and think, have a great influence on my behavior, social relationships, and material surroundings.

There is a dialectic between Materialism and Ideology in the composition of my personal history. I would play the role of social scientist, and attempt to examine my life for Truth, but any such examination is self-conscious in nature, and only adds to my Ideology.

Scientific method is an ideology. The concept of rationality is a classic Western ideology. Rationality may be irrational, depending on how we define it. Mathematics is ideology. (This helps validate the Hegelian view of history.) However, the manner in which we, human beings, go about examining life and analyzing our observations, is limited by the technology, the mode of production, of our senses and sensibilities. (On a personal identity level, this helps confirm the Marxist view of history.)

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The most powerful and most compounded/multi-dimensional/variable Ideology of my life is surely Love. I sometimes believe that I could convince myself into Love and just as easily convince myself out of it. Often when I'm with the one I love, I am so busy emoting and interpreting my lover's face/eyes/heart and pushing emotion onto my own face/eyes/heart, I'm so busy squeezing meaning and ideology into every moment, that I can not live the moments purely as they are. I can not live Love naturally; it almost feels dishonest, or dubiously heavy with sentimentality; like I am playing with time, stretching it with my face/eyes/heart. I feel like I'm constantly trying to manipulate Love by tampering with the natural emotions, loading on popularly constructed expressions of Love, for effect.

What is Love? Love is a dialectic between truthful recognition of the Material and an Ideal desire for beauty. The experience of Love is always somewhat unreal.